William Jones Proposes Indo-European Language Family

British jurist and philologist Sir William Jones delivered his Third Anniversary Discourse to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, arguing that Sanskrit bore such strong affinity to Greek and Latin in verb roots and grammatical forms that all three must have sprung from a common source. He extended this hypothesis to include Gothic, Celtic, and Persian. The address, published in 1788, provided the foundational argument for comparative linguistics and the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European.